Teachers move into dorms

CHICAGO -- Sanver Deren is new to the country and new to the University of Chicago. He's an 18-year-old freshman from Turkey and, well, getting used to America and being away from his family.\nHe lives in Palevsky Commons,and so do U. of C. music professor Martin Stokes and his family. A few Sundays ago, Deren wandered down the hall to the open-house brunch that Stokes and his wife, Lucy Baxandall, have for students every few weeks. And there was Stokes, a stranger, welcoming him.\nDeren told Stokes, 40, about his adjustments -- but he didn't indicate where he was from. Stokes, an Englishman, could relate to the culture shock; he looked at Deren sympathetically -- and started speaking to him in Turkish.\nAnd so began a conversation that only two people in the room understood, in which the pair discovered that they both play the same instrument, the Arabic lute. \n"He speaks really perfect Turkish," Deren marveled later. "It's a sign that the professors are close to us." \nAlthough the Turkish conversation was a coincidence, the success of Stokes' arrangement is no accident. He and Baxandall, a former teacher now pursuing a graduate degree at Columbia College, are what's known as "resident masters" at the U. of C., and they are one of several senior professors and their families who live in the largest dorms to help build a sense of community among underclassmen. \nThe masters and their assistants do this with brunches, dorm olympics and pumpkin-carving sessions -- even a blues concert. In September, Stokes and Baxandall welcomed students by inviting their friend, Chicago bluesman Eddie C. Campbell, in for a concert and jam session.\nThe setup is called the "residential college" system and, although it's old hat down at the University of Chicago, a growing number of colleges across the country are taking the RC plunge.\n"I do see a trend there," said Robert O'Hara, a biology professor at Vermont's Middlebury College. "My reading of it is that it's a fairly widespread reaction to the lack of attention paid to housing, student life and campus life over the last several decades. \n"I think the world is coming around again."\nA few professors have lived in U. of C. dorms for decades on a more casual basis, but it wasn't until 1970 that the university crafted its meticulous residential-college plans and retrofitted faculty apartments into the larger dorms. In so doing, it was following the lead of Harvard and Yale in the 1920s, which had followed the lead of Oxford and Cambridge over in Britain. \nToday, it's not just the expensive, intellectual schools that bring willing profs into the dorm rooms and dining halls. To varying degrees, schools from Ohio State and the University of Pennsylvania to University of California at Santa Cruz have implemented parts of the residential-college program.\n"For those who are a part of them, residential colleges really function as a second family," said Mark Ryan, former dean of residential colleges at Yale University, who wrote "A Collegiate Way of Living" ($15, Jonathan Edwards College) for the school.\n Edward Cook, a history professor and former dean at the U. of C., thinks the system has worked pretty well during the 15 years that he and his wife, Lee, have served as residential masters.\n"You go to class and, some days, the kids are really alert and really into whatever you're doing," Cook said. "And some days, they're almost falling asleep, and you don't know why. Well, actually, if you live here and you talk to them at meals, you get a better sense of what the rhythm of a student's schedule is -- what are the weeks in which they have a lot of midterm exams, and what are the kinds of courses that take up huge amounts of their energy"